The last concept that I want to discuss from David Bessis’s book is the idea that nothing is counterintuitive. I have often told people that many Lean concepts are hard to apply because they are counterintuitive. For example, smaller batches improve productivity, or stopping production for a quality issue is more effective than setting the issue aside. We often say that we need to “slow down to go faster.” What could be more counterintuitive than this? Yet David claims that “nothing is counterintuitive by nature”. Let’s explore and see if this can be true.
To accept this idea, it must be that operational ideas are unfamiliar rather than counterintuitive. If you go back to my previous newsletters, I talk a lot about the need to educate our intuition. Then our intuition must be either informed about a topic or uninformed. Working really fast or setting quality defects aside only seems natural because we don’t have the experience to see the downsides of these approaches. I can see the logic in this idea. We haven’t taken the time to educate ourselves. The starting point of any learning is often going to be wrong. I have told the story of my son learning to crawl and how he would push himself backward as he tried to move forward. I assure you, it is not that crawling is counterintuitive. It is that until you have tried something and received feedback, you are making guesses. And guessing is not intuition; it’s just guessing!
It is in our nature to guess. Think back to those standardized tests in school. What did you do when you could not remember the answer to a multiple-choice question? You guessed! You never left the question blank. It was not that the answer to the question was counterintuitive; it was that you did not know the solution. So you resorted to your main learning mechanism, which is to take a guess and see what happens. Again, this is not intuition; this is guessing. To reduce guessing, we need to educate ourselves and the people around us. Guessing is not a great way to run an operation. This is the cornerstone of Lean, Six Sigma, and other quality improvement methods. They all seek to educate people in operational principles that have been tested and refined over hundreds of years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
This is a really important concept for multiple reasons, and it was very eye-opening as I thought through David’s perspective. Teaching matters! Don’t assume common sense. Don’t assume we are all born with a common intuition. We are not! Our intuition is formed by our experience and the feedback on those experiences. This occurs continuously throughout our lifetime. Guess what? We all have different experiences. When we want to create a common culture, a common response to problems, and a common set of operational principles, we must teach those principles. When a concept feels counterintuitive, it may mean that we have failed to teach it effectively. Specifically, we need to show people that smaller batches can often be more efficient and then explain why. We have to show how quality issues pile up when we set them aside and how we continue to make more mistakes when we don’t correct the underlying error.
I like the idea that David presents because it highlights the value of taking the time to learn and taking the time to teach. I admit that I struggle to completely accept David’s notion that “Nothing is counterintuitive by nature.” For example, I am confused when I see people rush through something to get it done, only to spend more time fixing errors than if they had slowed down and done the work right the first time.
This points out another important idea. Our intuition can be misinformed. At some point in our lives, we got away with rushing through our work, making a bunch of mistakes, but still getting it done with minimal consequence. What this means is that we are not fighting something that is counterintuitive. Sometimes we simply don’t get the feedback we need in order to learn. We are fighting against ignoring signals about what works or what does not work.
It often happens that we fail to study the effect and internalize the consequence of our actions. This creates a misinformed intuition. People miss learning opportunities. This is why teaching matters. Importantly, we cannot stop at just telling people the principle. They have to experience it to educate their intuition. We must look for ways that they can experience it and reflect on why the principle is true.
Whether you accept this idea that nothing is counterintuitive by nature or not, I hope you take from this the realization that intuition can be misinformed. Call it ignorance, call it counterintuitive. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that we need to inform our nature with facts through experience and reflection. If all we do is guess and never reflect, then we don’t learn. We continue to perform inefficiently and make mistakes. For those of us who are trying to educate organizations on operational principles, it means that we need to make sure people are getting the feedback needed to improve their intuition.
If you enjoyed these last several newsletters where I explore the language of math, the process of intuition, and their relationship to continuous improvement, then I recommend you read David Bess’s book, Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity. It was an eye-opener for me. It is difficult to take his thoughts and turn them into a handful of newsletters and provide the full richness of his thoughts. Still, I hope you can take something back that you can use. And I hope you will work to improve your own intuition and that of those around you.